in my blood there's gasoline
by ulstergirl
Summary: Goren and Eames in a hotel in Seoul, on their way back to New York during Masquerade. BA pairing.


**Set while Goren and Eames are in Seoul, on their way back to New York, during Season 6's Masquerade. Adult situations and language; slightly edited from original version.**

* * *

Eames feels more at home in a hotel room in Seoul than in her own bed.

She forced herself to go back into her own house, back into her own bed, because no one else was going to do it for her. Olivet had talked about getting a guard dog, someone or something to make her feel safer than the gun and badge at her waist, but she's been sleeping alone for a long time.

And she can't exactly tell Olivet that if she did actually adopt a German Shepherd, she'd probably spend her weekends training it to kill Nicole Wallace on sight. Those kinds of breakthroughs aren't considered helpful.

Although the thought of throwing Fife into a South Korean prison appealed to her, Goren had arranged for guards to watch him, just to make sure he didn't throw some new grand publicity stunt, like flinging himself from his twentieth-story window. His room is between theirs. Fife isn't going anywhere, except the hell of an American prison, where the cop-killers look down on crazy halfbaked pedophiles.

She'd heard Goren instructing the guards in his broken Korean and shivered a little when she realized how he'd probably picked that up.

Eames had to dig through her wardrobe to find a pair of matching pajamas, packing for their little adventure, and these are flannel, faded, with a rip she didn't notice in the side seam. Their hotel is too cheap for bathrobes, and she feels more than a little paranoid when she slides her gun into her pocket. The most trouble Olivet had in all their sessions was making her acknowledge her own fear. It's a bitter thing, and it still catches her like a cracked bone, when her own reflection manages to spook her, when she's still tense and jittery at 3 a.m. Now that she and Goren are both liabilities, this is less a vacation for them than a break for Ross.

She snickers to herself when she realizes that she's just called ferrying a pedophile back to New York a vacation.

She taps on Bobby's door five minutes later, eyeing the uniformed guard standing outside Fife's room, watching him not watch her. He cracks the door and she sees jet lag in the angle of his eyelids, in the slump of his shoulders, as his gaze traces down, to the ice bucket cradled jauntily between her elbow and the jutted point of her hip. Her other hand is empty.

"I don't remember ordering room service," he cracks, shouldering the door open another few feet, and she ducks under his braced arm, into his room. The files, fewer than usual, are spread over his desk, even though Ross said repeatedly that this wasn't something they were trying to figure out, just an easy assignment, something meant to help her get back into the swing of things, as though Major Case had a legitimate angle on this. As though her new job title was jetsetting bail bondsman extraordinaire.

"Why the ice?"

She turns around to face him; he has his hands jammed in his pockets, and he's very careful to hide that pained, almost yearning look he gets when they're around each other now. Like he can't trust himself, like he was supposed to realize Jo was batshit insane. Like it was equally his hand, raising the hook to hoist her arms over her head.

She shivers a little at that. She has enough trouble washing her own hair now.

"Eames?"

If she doesn't say something he'll start channeling Olivet and telling her things she doesn't want to hear, so she offers the ice bucket to him, holding his gaze even as his fingertips slide over hers. "Thought you'd probably have something we could put this in."

--

She goes back to her own room to sleep because it would be so terribly clichéd to get drunk with Bobby in a hotel room halfway around the world and then fall into bed with him. She doesn't feel up to it; when she's alone, really alone, she just feels bruised, brittle, like all the solid space beneath her skin is just so much air. She only feels heavy when she's scared, and here, she isn't scared, and whatever they do, it'll be over in the morning.

She's just, finally, reached that warm equilibrium, has just slipped over when she jerks awake to the sound of her keyreader activating.

Immediately she's half-convinced it's Jo, and she's groping on the bedside table for her gun when the door slides open on the security chain, and she recognizes Bobby's silhouette.

"For God's sake," she mutters, heart still hammering in her skull, and tosses back the bedding. He's looking at his hands when she opens the door, one hand perched on her hip, and he keeps it shouldered open as she uses that bare square of illumination to find her way back to bed.

"You okay?"

"Couldn't sleep," he admits, taking one heavy step into the room, running his hand through his hair. "Have you had nightmares?"

She doesn't even have to ask what he's talking about. Her throat thickens and she doesn't answer, watching him pull the chair away from the desk and lower himself into it. She didn't bother turning the lights on and he left them off, so she watches the way the light from the skyline bleeds just between the curtains, touching his cheek, that droop-eyed gaze of his.

"Remember, the car, your car? We found it at One PP?"

"Yeah," she says, and her voice sounds rusty, and it didn't before.

"I keep... they open the trunk and what Declan said, is true. When he said you were already gone."

She hears that strange lilt at the end of his voice, and no, no. Even though she and Goren have been partners longer than she and Joe were married. It was bad enough to see the expression on Goren's face when he saw her in the hospital bed. It was bad enough to hear how restless he was while she was on leave. It was bad enough, having to read that damn letter on the stand. She's going to burn for this, she knows it.

When she was in Vice, Joe used to joke with her, how her school buddies, the ones who watched her get crowned prom queen, would love to see her in the fishnets and fake fur, in the flame-red lipstick and microminiskirts. Vice was so damn straightforward. And then, in that awful uncertain time after Joe's death, she had somehow managed to make it to MCS, without him around to see it, swearing to herself that it wouldn't be another cop next time, wouldn't be someone who would slowly bleed himself into a coma for wearing a mic during a sting op.

And, damn him, somewhere along the way she had planned how she'd do this, and it didn't involve those damn fishnets and microminis or a raggedy pair of flannel pajamas. She'd toyed with it like some secret guilt, knowing the entire time it was the easiest way to destroy her life again.

Half the time she was sure Deakins had suspected it, that their solve rate had precluded any question about the means they used. Half the time she thought everyone else knew it too, the ones they conned when they played married.

But in all that time she had never, ever imagined Jo.

And somehow, at two o'clock, when she's scrolling feverishly through the channels and praying mutely for dreamless sleep, she never imagines him doing the same. Even though he was the one who kept searching, beyond all reason and rationality.

He's been quiet too long, but she goes to him anyway, wrapping her arms around him, shushing him like a child. "It's all right."

"I can't do this job without you."

"Yes you can. You have."

"A week longer and Bishop would have put a hit out on me."

She laughs, at the sardonic tone in his voice, in relief because that terrifying lilt is gone, even though his palm is resting at the small of her back, fingertips resting against her spine. "No."

"Yeah, Alex."

It's something in the way his voice catches and holds her name, drawing it out; it's something in the way his hands move at her waist. She looks down, catching his gaze, the glint of his eyes in that sliver of light, and his mouth is drawn fine. There is no ease here, and what will make tonight easier will make next week, next month unbearable.

She pulls her top over her head, his hands still resting at her hips, like he is bowed, like he is hers.

--

She isn't sure when he started to waver. She wants to blame it on Bishop, but it's not so easy as that. His equilibrium seems off, or maybe it's her. Olivet says that there will be a day she can smell roses without panicking. Olivet also said something about not making choices like this for a while, but then Bobby's fingers are between her waistband and her skin and there is no other option, really.

They leave their clothes in piles on the floor and climb into bed, the sheets only faintly suggestive of warmth, and she slides her hand into his hair and kisses him hard, bruise-hard, his arm curling around her waist.

"Tell me you aren't doing this because you feel sorry for me."

"Is that why you are?" His voice is rasping, low, the fact of his nakedness radiating to brush her skin. Spectacularly bad idea.

She shifts her weight to her side, her palm on his cheek. "Guess I had to see if you were bluffing."

"There are some things I don't have to bluff about, Eames."

She never thought about his fingers, their length and breadth, until he slides one up between her legs and she lets out a muffled gasp, her body practically vibrating with need. She has nothing so equally dramatic, no wobbly tearstained declaration that her abduction had finally made her see how much she needed him, that she just needed to feel alive again. This wasn't the way.

_I thought I was going to die._

That is the truth. Not _before I could tell you I love you,_ not _and that made me realize I'm in love with you. _

His fingers.

She thinks, for not the first time, how brilliant, how terrifying, it must be, to be the object of his undivided attention, and how she'll never see him twirl a pencil in his fingers without thinking of this, and then he slides another into her and she shudders, gasping so hard she can feel her hair against her mouth.

"We," she begins, and the rest of it is _need to stop_, but it's just as hard to say as it ever was. She lets her palm drift down, over the bob of his adam's apple, his shoulder. She measures his length with her palm and earns her own answering gasp. He'll do what he wants, as he always does.

She touches him, though, because it's a rare pleasure to find him so speechless. Not stammering like the bumbling persona he puts on in the interview room. Maybe he'll blame himself the rest of his life, for this, the way he has done for everything else, but she can't control that. She can only control this.

He rolls away from her for a moment and when he comes back with the condom, she takes it out of his hand, rolling it on with a few deft strokes of her fingers.

And then she fits her hips over his and leans down, the tips of her hair brushing his chest, as she grinds down against him, his fingers brushing, digging into her hips, his breath a soft relieved sigh above her head.

If she has to pay for this, she'll make it worth it.

--

She can tell when it starts to wear off, when he's thinking clearly again. His fingers linger on her, measuring every part of her, sorting her into his memory. He makes no move to leave and she makes no move to kick him out; there will be enough time for that later. His stubble burns the heel of her hand.

She and Joe were practically broke after their wedding, and they spent their honeymoon on the Jersey shore, tangled up like this, although at twenty-six she'd only thought herself jaded. They had smiled at each other when they woke, wrapped up so completely in each other, so in love.

It's not so simple as that. When she smiles at him across the pillows it's to derail that furrowed look, to head off any introspection. She feels protective of him, even now; even when she was caught in his riptide she had become so strangely proud of her role as his link to the rest of the world, like his was a language she had come to learn.

But this is not love. She loved Joe, she _loves_ Joe still, so much that walking by a man wearing his aftershave can turn her brooding and distracted. She feels like Bobby's big sister, and she knows he would take a bullet for her, knows she would take a bullet for him, knows that in a way he's just as much her link to the rest of the world. She is almost always fascinated, bemused, exasperated by him.

And now her universe has contracted again, and now he _knows,_ like it was some deeply shameful thing, like he was innocent before tonight. She had thought there was no naivete left in her soul to burn.

She's scoured out. His hand is on her hip, and he turns her onto her side, sliding behind her, body molding to hers. She is left only to close her eyes and watch, as his fingers find every secret part of her.

"This is too much," he says, softly, regret in his voice, but he doesn't stop.

She thinks about saying it, until it's the only thing she can think, repeating over and over in her head as her hips circle and grind against his, fingers fluttering. _I didn't know until this happened, I didn't know, I didn't._

"Not enough," she gasps instead, and he chuckles, following as she rolls onto her knees.

Without her, he will slide out of orbit. Gravity will lose her sway. He will be like Declan, ostracized and alone, and he will spawn monsters.

If she had known then, what she knows now, when she shook his hand seven years ago.

She closes her eyes, muffling her groan in the pillow, realizing too late that there was no pause for another condom, they are skin to skin, wet and shaking. His weight. His sigh, his weight.

She struggles under him and he immediately pushes himself up, letting her turn into her back, to gaze up at him, and it's all bad enough. Her lower lip trembles once, and she glances away from him.

_I didn't know until I left you in the room with him, how pointless it would all seem without you._

When she looks back he's smiling, that old smile from when her respect for him was fighting her exasperation and shock at his methods, when she was just acquiring his taste.

"I know," he says, with that little tilt, and she wraps her legs around him, giggling, actually _giggling,_ pulling him down to her so his laughter vibrates against her belly.

She's suddenly, blindingly grateful just to be alive.


End file.
